Pat Buchanan on Foreign Policy

2000 Reform Candidate for President

Islam attempts to reshape and replace the West

An increasingly Islamic world is inevitable. What makes Islam a candidate to reshape and replace the West?

First, with a more robust birth rate, its population is growing, while that of the West is declining. Second, immigration is bringing Islam back
to Europe, 500 years after its expulsion from Spain and three centuries after the retreat from the Balkans began. Millions have come to fill spaces left empty by aging, dying, and aborted Europeans. Third, as there was once a church militant, there is
today a mosque militant.

Fourth, Islam gives its believers clear, cogent, and coherent answers to the great questions: Who created me? Why am I here? How do I live righteously? Islam gives men a reason to live and a cause to die for. It is a fighting
faith.

Lastly, Islam is a universal religion which claims it alone has the path to salvation and is destined to become the religion of all mankind. Islam divides the world into the lost and the elect, the Dar al-Harb and the Dar al-Islam.

Soviet Union was torn apart by ethnonationalism

Ethnonationalism, the force that tore the Soviet Union apart, the relentless drive of people to separate that translates into tribalism within a country, is not only pulling our world apart, it is tearing at the seams of American union.
And the ideals that once defined us as a people--freedom, equality, democracy--have been corrupted into concepts more reminiscent of Marxist revolutions than of the American Revolution.

For what is a nation?

Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in
Lincoln's words, by "bonds of affection, mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone"?

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say that America is still a nation?

China wins competition because US regulations don't apply

In Albany, Georgia, tires made in China were selling for less than tires made at the Cooper Tire plant just down the road. Unable to compete, Cooper Tire shut down its Albany plant, and 2,100 Georgians lost their jobs. How could tires made on the other
side of the world, then shipped to Georgia, be sold for less than tires made in Georgia? At Cooper, the wages were $18 to $21 per hour; in China, a fraction of that. The Albany factory was subject to US health-and-safety, wage-and-hour, and civil rights
laws, from which Chinese plants are exempt. At the Cooper plant, environmental standards had to be met or the factory would be shut down. China's factories are notorious polluters.

China won the competition because China can pay its workers little,
force them to work longer, and operate plants whose health, safety, and environmental standards would have their US competitors shut down as public nuisances. Thus did China, between 2004 and 2008, triple her share of the US tire market.

Palestinian state needed for Israel to remain Jewish state

Not any Iranian weapon of mass destruction but demography is the existential crisis of the Jewish nation. According to the UN figures, Israel's population will exceed 10 million by 2050. But the Arab share will be almost 30 percent. Palestinians in the
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, 4.4 million today, will then number more than 10 million. By midcentury, then, Palestinians west of the Jordan River will outnumber Jews two to one.

If Israel is to remain a Jewish state, a Palestinian state seems a national imperative. Yitzhak Rabin came to recognize this, but was assassinated. Ehud Barak came to recognize this and sought to bring it about.
In his last days in office, Ehud Olmert warned, "if the two-state solution collapses," Israel will "face a South African-style struggle."

China's 1-child policy results in millions of aborted girls

There's a population crisis in a country where few would expect it--the world's most populous nation, China, with 1.3 billion people.

Due to Beijing's one-couple, one-child policy, which has led to tens of millions of aborted baby girls, 12% to 15% of
young Chinese men will be unable to find wives. As single makes are responsible for most of society's violence, the presence of tens of millions of young single Chinese men portends a time of trouble in the Middle Kingdom. One reporter toured China to
assess the impact of the draconian policy he called "gendercide" for its systematic extermination of baby girls.

"By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in the giant Empire. Nothing like this has ever happene
to any civilization before. Speculation is now seething about what might happen: a war to cull the surplus males, a rise in crime, a huge expansion in the prostitution that is already a major industry in every Chinese city, a rise in homosexuality."

Roman Empire fell due to cultural dilution; so might we

History repeats itself. After the Roman republic spread out, Rome became a polyglot city of all creeds and cultures of the empire. But these alien people brought with them no reverence for
Roman gods, no respect for Roman tradition, no love of Roman culture. And so, as Rome had conquered the barbarians, the barbarians conquered Rome.
In the 5th century, beginning with Alaric and the Visigoths in 410, the northern tribes, one after another, invaded and sacked the Eternal City. And the Dark Ages descended.

And as Rome passed away, so, the West is passing away,
from the same causes and in much the same way. What the Danube and Rhine were to Rome, the Rio Grande and Mediterranean are to America and Europe, the frontiers of a civilization no longer defended.

Dying civilization comes from cultural & moral degeneration

As our elites nervously avert their gaze or welcome the invasion, we are witness to one of the great tragedies in human history. The symptoms of dying civilizations are well known: the death of faith, the degeneration of morals, contempt for the old
values, collapse of the culture, paralysis of the will. But the two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die are a declining population and foreign invasions no longer resisted.

The self-delusion about what is happening and the paralysis in
the face of the crisis have no precedent. What can be said for a man who would allow his home to be invaded by strangers? What can be said for ruling elite that permits this to be done to the nation, and that celebrates it as a milestone of moral
progress?

We are witnessing how nations perish. We are entered upon the final act of civilization. The last scene is the deconstruction of the nations. The penultimate scene, now well underway, is the invasion unresisted.

Avoid the democratist temptation of the internationalists

With the Cold War ending, we should look, too, with a cold eye on the international set, never at a loss for new ideas to divert US wealth and power into crusades and causes having little or nothing to do with the true national interest of the
United States. High among these is the democratist temptation [free the world], the worship of democracy as a form of governance and the concomitant ambition to see all mankind embrace it, or explain why not.
Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of process[political pragmatism] for a love of country.
The true national interests of the United States are not to be found in some hegemonic and utopian world order. Bush holds global democracy as a goal. This is a formula for endless conflict. “

Never be isolationist; but stop being interventionist

We must give up the empire, bring the troops home, let lapse the old treaty commitments dating to a Cold War ended 15 years ago. As the greatest republic in history, America has never been and can never be an isolationist nation. But we must cease to be
compulsively interventionist one. We must stop volunteering to fight other nations' wars, defend other nations' borders, and pay other nations' bills, or we will go down as all the other empires of the 20th century did before us. And for the same reason.

Source: Where the Right Went Wrong, by Pat Buchanan, p.253
, Aug 12, 2004

China today does not threaten any vital US interests

As China is one nation with the size, population, ideology, and power to contest the US for hegemony in Asia, is war inevitable?

Answer: Neither today nor tomorrow does there appear to be any grievance between us so great as to justify war.
War is possible. But whether it comes will depend upon China and upon us.

China today does not threaten any vital US interest. Even her annexation of Taiwan would not threaten us.
Should Beijing establish her hegemony over the South China Sea, how would that imperil the United States? If South Korea and Japan were to follow the
Philippines and ask us to close our bases, how would that threaten our survival as a great, free, and independent republic? While it might mean the end of our Asian hegemony, it would not mean the end of the United States.

Foreign aid, like welfare, creates permanent dependency

If conservatives believe that sending tax dollars to the national government in Washington is the wrong way to promote prosperity in the US, how can sending our tax dollars to the governments in capitals abroad be the right way to promote prosperity
in the Third World? Americans have always been first to help people on crises with food, shelter, medicine, and no president would discontinue that policy, but regular cash transfers to failed foreign regimes is a failed policy.
Like welfare, it creates permanent dependency. One recalls that it was only when Taiwan and South Korea and the nations of Southeast Asia were taken off foreign aid that their economies began to take off. But this is unpersuasive to a
White House that committed to increase foreign aid by 65% between 2002 and 2006. Pres. Bush appears now to agree with the Left--that one measures true compassion solely by the amount of tax dollars one is willing to expend.

Imposing our morality abroad is "moral imperialism"

Bush addressed West Point in 2002, "Moral truth is the same in every culture, and in every place," he declared. But for one nation in a world of 190 to assert a right to define morality for all peoples for all times, and attempt to impose its code on
all mankind, is a moral imperialism certain to end in calamity and tragedy.

In this most Christianized of countries, premarital sex, homosexual unions, and abortions are considered normal and moral by our cultural elites.
Islamic societies reject them as immoral. Who does President Bush believe is right? At the UN, Christians cooperate with Muslims to defeat European and American progressives. Who does the president believe is on the side of "moral truth"?
If moral truth is the same "in every culture, in every time, and every place," why do men yet disagree on the morality of what we did to Hamburg, Hiroshima, Dresden, and Nagasaki?

In Asia, China is rising power and America is receding

As America's fights the small wars of democratic imperialism in the Near and Middle East, in the Far East, a power is rising that may prove a far greater challenge to the United States in the twenty-first century. In Asia, China is the rising power,
America the receding one.

With a growth rate of 8 percent, a capable and energetic population of 1.3 billion, the silent allegiance of millions of "overseas Chinese" from Singapore to
San Francisco, a history of having been the world's foremost civilization and Middle Kingdom between heaven and earth, China is determined to become again the first power on earth.

What America and
China must avoid is the fate of Wilhelmine Germany and the Britain of George V, when the world's rising power and receding power stumbled into a thirty-year war that destroyed both.

Interventionism is the incubator of terrorism

In the presidential campaign of 2000, we failed to make foreign policy the issue. But what I said then retains relevance:

How can all our meddling not fail to spark some horrible retribution....
Have we not suffered enough--from Pan Am 103, to the World Trade Center, to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam--not to know that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism?
Or will it take some cataclysmic atrocity on US soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire?

America today faces a choice of destinies.
We can choose to be a peacemaker of the world, or its policeman who goes about night-sticking troublemakers until we, too, find ourselves in some bloody brawl we cannot handle.

Account for losses before any third-world debt forgiveness

‘Debt forgiveness’ is a fancy phrase for shifting the total burden of defaulted debts off Third World regimes and onto the backs of American taxpayers. These loans are not being wiped off the books; they are being added to the US national debt.
Before one dime in ‘loan forgiveness’ is granted to any Third World government, the American people have a right to know who lost, who looted, and who stole the billions of dollars we are being asked to forgive. We need responsibility; we need a full
accounting of how the generosity of the American people was criminally abused -- by incompetent or corrupt lending officers at the IMF and World Bank, and by the assorted dictators and thieves who stole or squandered the billions in aid
intended for the peoples they misruled. We have a right to know the names of those who lost or stole the money, and to an accounting of any and all efforts to recover the looted billions.

Source: Press Release
, Apr 24, 2000

Cuba: Siege mentality is pillar of power; end embargo

A supporter of sanctions in the past against Cuba, Buchanan said conditions had changed with the fall of Soviet Communism. “Because of the siege mentality our embargo has created inside Cuba,” he said, “our sanctions may today be the main pillar of
Castro’s power.” Dictatorial governments do not justify sanctions, Buchanan said, adding, “No one has deputized America to play Wyatt Earp to the world. Have we succumbed to the hubris of hegemony?”

Source: NY Times, p. A22
, Dec 17, 1999

Russia: Offer EU membership instead of encirclement

Wounded and amputated, bereft of its cubs, the Russian bear should not be provoked. Rather than encircling Russia, let us enlarge Russia’s stake in peace. Bringing Russia into the European Union would be a far wiser guarantee of
Europe’s security than a threat to go to war to defend their frontiers. By moving NATO onto Mother Russia’s front porch, we are driving her into the arms of Beijing and creating a hostile alliance it is in our vital interest to prevent.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.385-6
, Oct 9, 1999

Japan: share burdens(defense) & benefits(trade) equitably

America has a vital interest in ensuring that Japan’s industrial might and military potential are not placed in any global balance against us. Yet in this partnership, Tokyo has done most of the taking. Japan runs up huge trade surpluses, while
denying Americans fair access to its markets. America is obligated to fight for Japan; Japan has no corresponding obligation. We need a new partnership agreement by which the burdens and benefits, risks and responsibilities, are more equitably shared.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.379
, Oct 9, 1999

Korea: Replace US troops with Koreans

With twice the population of the North and 20 times its economic power, South Korea, with access to US weapons and US strategic support, is capable of manning its own defense. American troops on the DMZ should be replaced by South Koreans;
the US should remove its forces from the peninsula; and any US participation in a future Korean war should be restricted to air and naval support.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.378
, Oct 9, 1999

Puerto Rico: No statehood; eventual independence

The campaign to make Puerto Rico the 51st state must be defeated. Puerto Rico is a nation, with its own language, history, culture, and flag. To make this island a state means making America a bilingual nation and
denying to Puerto Rican patriots and nationalists, forever, their right to join the family of nations. We cannot do that and remain true to or anticolonial heritage. Puerto Rico should forever retain the right of self-determination.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.373
, Oct 9, 1999

Quebec: Offer seceding provinces alliances or statehood

Canada has not been a security concern in this century. That is changing. Quebec may declare independence, and the Maritime and Western provinces could separate from Ottawa. Americans may profoundly regret a breakup of Canada, but we are not a
disinterested party; Canada is the most important country on earth for us. Should it come apart, the US should offer trade agreements and security alliances to each successor state, and statehood itself, should any breakaway Canadian province wish it.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.370
, Oct 9, 1999

Latin America: Support Monroe Doctrine but exit Rio Pact

The next president should restate the US position that the Monroe Doctrine is the cornerstone of American foreign policy, and that the US will consider it unacceptable for any hostile regime to create a bastion in this hemisphere. But the US should
disavow any right or intention to intervene in any Latin American country that does not threaten us or its neighbors. As for the Rio Pact, the US should give notice of its withdrawal. We do not need military allies in this hemisphere to defend ourselves.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.369
, Oct 9, 1999

Poland: NATO membership implies nuclear defense

Are we willing to use nuclear weapons to defend Eastern Europe-for that is what NATO membership means. Poland has never been a vital US interest. To assert that Poland’s democracy and frontiers are now matters over which we will fight a nuclear war is a
reckless commitment. NATO is not a social club. It is a military alliance, [stating] “an armed attack on one NATO nation is to be considered an armed attack on all.” Should Russian troops skirmish with Polish troops, America could be at war.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p. 18-21
, Oct 9, 1999

Logistical help OK in East Timor, but no ground troops

Q: East Timor: The president announced that the US would participate, in a limited way, in a UN peacekeeping force going to East Timor. Should the US be participating?

A: There should be no American ground troops there. I do believe the Australians
should go in, the Portuguese and some Asian nations. That’s a regional problem there. What’s happening there is atrocious, of course. It’s the responsibility of the Indonesian government, which basically overran that area, killed some 200,000 people at
the very time the US was funneling aid and support in there. So I think we have a measure of moral responsibility, but I don’t believe American troops ought to be on the ground. We’ve got too many American troops all over the world right now doing
peacekeeping functions when their job is to defend the US. I think you should help with logistics, intelligence support, getting those people in there. But this is a job for the Australians and the Asians in the neighborhood.

Source: Interview on “Meet the Press”
, Sep 12, 1999

Pat Buchanan on China

Break trade ties with PRC if they attack Taiwan

We should inform the Chinese that:

While we not dispute China's sovereignty over Taiwan, any attack on the island would mean a rupture in trade ties and risk a naval clash.

To remove China's fears of encirclement, we should declare our
intent to dismantle US bases in South Korea, Japan, and in the old Soviet republics.

We should tell China the US sees no threat in the natural growth of Chinese economic and military power and influence in Asia.

However, if China will not assist
the US in effecting the nuclear disarmament of North Korea, we will cease placing nuclear restrictions on Japan and South Korea.

Failure of China to cooperate in restricting sales of nuclear technology to nations hostile to the US will be taken as a
sign China is indifferent to US interests.

While we take no sides in the territorial disputes in the South China Sea, the US Navy will continue to treat that sea as international waters.

Opposed Shanghai Communique's "One China" policy

The US position on Taiwan is ambiguous. In 1972, in the Shanghai Communique, the US addressed the "crucial question obstructing the normalization of relations":

"The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait
maintain there is but one China & that Taiwan is part of China."

Jimmy Carter severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and recognized the People's Republic as the sole legitimate government of China. A firestorm ensued. Reagan reaffirmed the Shanghai
Communique--that Taiwan was a part of China--and agreed to cut back arms sales to the island.

While this writer, among others, opposed the Shanghai Communique and the more far-reaching Carter and Reagan concessions, the day when Taiwan might have
declared independence with US support is gone.

Looking back over the half century since Chiang's army fled the mainland, two realities emerge. America has been Taiwan's only true friend, and the US commitment to the island grows weaker each decade.

China has a point in denouncing US containment as hegemony

If the Chinese are denouncing US "containment" and "American hegemony," do they not have a point? How would we react to Chinese bases in Mexico & Nova Scotia "to fight terrorism"? How would we respond to Chinese reconnaissance flights off our coasts and
Chinese naval patrols in the Gulf of Mexico?

If China's hawks see in America a superpower resolved to encircle, contain, and deny her her rightful place in the sun, are they wrong? Is this not declared US policy in the National Strategy Statement?

A prominent Chinese scholar has charged that "the US uses the fight against terrorism as an opportunity to pursue its hegemonic strategy, carried out under the cover of antiterrorism." Considering how we launched a preemptive war on Iraq to disarm it of
weapons it did not have, does that scholar not have an argument?

If Beijing believes America intends the replacement of its regime with a democracy, is regime change in China not an end goal of President Bush's "world democratic revolution"?

Chinese nationalism requires control of Tibet and Xinjiang

In 1989, as Communist regimes were falling like dominoes across Eastern Europe, China's Communist Party seemed to be at imminent risk of being overthrown. Only tanks in Tiananmen Square saved the regime.

The party now justifies itself as the vessel of
Chinese nationalism that will recover China's lost territories and make her again the first nation on earth. The regime must deliver or the regime is at risk.

China is not only preoccupied with consolidating control over the Tibetans and
Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, who detest their Han Chinese overlords, and suppressing Christians and the Falun Gong, she has suspicious and even hostile neighbors in Russia, in the Muslim lands to the west (and on all other borders).

Anywhere China
shifts her weight, she rubs up against a nation or people with reason to fear her. China is contained in the Taiwan Strait by U.S. naval power. Elsewhere on her frontiers, she is contained by Asian and Islamic nationalists who are her nervous neighbors.

Taiwan should accept "One China, Two Systems" like Hong Kong

The US has made clear it does not dispute China's claim to Taiwan. But the island is not to be brought back by force. When, whether, and how Taiwan & the mainland are reunited must be resolved peacefully. So the Taiwan Relations Act declares.

However,
first, last, and always, the US must consider its own vital interests. We cannot give any nation a blank check to drag us into war.

If Taiwan agrees to reunite peacefully with the mainland, to accept the status of Hong Kong, a "One China, Two Systems"
policy, the US could not object. Indeed, Taiwan looking out for her own interests first, is deeply engaged in China. Some 50,000 Taiwanese companies have $60 billion in investments on the mainland. A million Taiwanese visit there each year. Hundreds of
thousands of Taiwanese live in Shanghai.

Our mutual security treaty has been dead for a quarter century. It cannot be revived. Yet, our national interest and honor dictate that we do not permit an old friend to be brutalized & bound off into captivity.

Supported opening China in 1970s, but situation has changed

With regard to my old colleague Henry Kissinger, I’m one of 10 surviving members of that official delegation, that opened up the PRC, and where I break with Mr. Kissinger is this: When we went to China, we were trying to get our men out of Vietnam, and
the Chinese military was positioned all along the Soviet border. Now all those Chinese forces have been moved [to threaten] our friends on Taiwan and against our country. And the weapons are being bought to fight a war against a naval power in the
western Pacific, the United States.

When I saw this redeployment, I said, ‘It is time the US stopped building up this--what could be this Frankenstein monster and took a hard look at what they’re doing.’ They persecute Christians. They persecute
dissidents. They threaten our country. What in heaven’s name are we doing giving them a $ 70 billion trade surplus every single year when they’re using it to buy weapons to threaten our men and women?

Source: National Public Radio interview, “Talk of the Nation”
, May 30, 2000

Don’t aggravate Beijing, but don’t appease

US policy toward China should be neither to aggravate bor to appease Beijing. But allowing China to run near $60 billion annual trade surpluses at our expense, while we guarantee low-interest loans to Beijing from the World Bank, is appeasement.
American imports and investments there are financing military forces that may one day threaten Asia and the US fleet. As trade and aid have not made China more reasonable, the US should treat China as the Great Power rival it claims to be.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.376-7
, Oct 9, 1999

Support Free Asia with materiel but no troops

So long as the US guarantees the security of the nations of Free Asia, they, like Europeans, will never undertake to provide for, or to pay for, their own defense. The US should thus unilaterally declare in force the Nixon Doctrine: in future Asian wars,
America will provide the weapons of defense for free nations, but Asian soldiers, sailors, and airmen must do the fighting. As the century closes, we should end our role as a front-line fighting state in Asia, and become Free Asia’s arsenal of democracy.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.376
, Oct 9, 1999

Truculent but contained China is no threat

As China has grown powerful, it has grown truculent. Beijing has disrupted Taiwan’s elections, invaded offshore islands, sold missiles to Iran, sold nuclear technology to Pakistan, and persecuted Christians, Tibetans, and dissidents. Yet, despite its
bellicosity, China does not today threaten any vital US interest, & its emergence as a world power need not mean inevitable conflict. For China is already contained - by geography. [The only likely point of conflict without] a blue-water fleet. is Taiwan

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.374
, Oct 9, 1999

Provide Taiwan with defensive weapons against China

We should provide Taiwan with all the defensive weapons it needs to stave off any potential attack by Communist China. I don’t believe there’s going to be a cross-channel invasion. I do believe you could have trouble with the offshore islands of Quemoy &
Matsu. I do believe we should stand behind Taiwan. And I don’t believe we should appease China. I think the US should back up Taiwan. But I would not automatically commit this country to go to war with China over some collision in the Taiwan Straits.

Source: Interview on “Meet the Press”
, Sep 12, 1999

Pat Buchanan on Globalization

Kick UN out of US by 2001; use Marines to “help pack”

My friends, this to me is one of the great issues, now that the cold war is over, and it is whether America is going to remain forever independent and free, with liberty and justice in this country, as determined by us, Americans. Or
whether this decision-making authority is going to go back to the United Nations and leave this country, and that is where a number of elitists want to take us. Let me tell you what I would do if I’m elected president. I will get the
United States out of the World Trade Organization. I will get the United States out of the International Monetary Fund, and I will tell Kofi Annan, up at the U.N.: “Sir, your lease on Turtle Bay has run out. We want the United
Nations out of the United States by year’s end. And if you’re having trouble leaving, we’ll send up 10,000 marines to help you pack.”

All US troops out of Europe by end of first term

We can be the peacemaker of the world - or its policeman. Let us use this transitory moment of American power and preeminence to encourage allies to pay for their own defense. If elected, I will have all US troops home from Europe by the end of my
first term. Certainly, sixty years after the end of World War II, and fifteen years after the Berlin Wall fell, is not too soon to get all US troops out of Europe and let Europeans provide and pay the cost of their own defense. If not now, when?

Struggle against emerging world government

“Loyalty to the New World Order is disloyalty to the Republic. In nation after nation, the struggle between patriotism and globalism is under way.” Buchanan said the Clinton administration is allowing the UN to intrude on America’s sovereignty.
At the same time, he said, the US is guilty of “trampling on the sovereignty” of other nations by injecting troops in internal conflicts, such as Kosovo. “If ever sovereignty becomes obsolete, we may expect America’s involvement in endless wars until,
one day, we pay a horrific price in some act of cataclysmic terror on our own soil,“ Buchanan said. ”For interventionism is the spawning pool of international terror.“ The UN is increasingly seeking authority over US troops and control of the nation’s
borders, Buchanan warned. ”This then is a millennial struggle that succeeds the Cold War: It is the struggle of patriots of every nation against a world government where all nations yield up their sovereignty and fade away,“ he said.

Base alliances on their view of US; not on democracy status

The US posture toward other nations should be based not on their internal arrangements but on their stance toward us. Just as policies and regimes pass, so, too, should alliances be temporary and transient. Whether a nation is democratic should
be of less concern to us than how it views America. The form of government nations adopt is their own business. The rise of autocrats does not threaten us if we decline to make the internal affairs of other nations our central concern.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p. 14-15
, Oct 9, 1999

Independence, not isolationism

The message of George Washington’s Farewell Address was not to isolate America from Europe but to keep it independent of Europe. Stay out of foreign wars, Washington admonished. Look west to the mountains, the plains, the Pacific.
That is where our destiny lies. Europe is the past. Avoid “permanent alliances”; devote your energies to your own country. Independence, not isolation, is the American tradition.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p. 52
, Oct 9, 1999

Globalist Elites have not yielded their empire

American boys yet unborn are being committed to fight where no American soldiers have ever fought before. In a 1990 article, I wrote: “The day of realpoliticians, with their Metternichian ‘new architectures’ and balance-of-power stratagems... is over.”
I was wrong. I underestimated the grip that the globalist elites have on power, and the will of these elites never to yield the bureaucratic-military empire--the existence of which gives meaning to their lives. But that hold is weakening.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.328
, Oct 9, 1999

Practice “masterly inactivity,” not “entangling alliances”

America did very well in the 1800s, Buchanan argues in his book, because it avoided “entangling alliances,” wasting neither men nor treasure on foreign wars. It should not have fought Germany in 1917 (“no vital interest”), nor in the 1940s (“no threat”).
If it wishes to remain the world’s pre-eminent power in the 21st century, it must give wide berth to the Kosovos, Somalias, and East Timors that constantly cry for attention. “Masterly inactivity” is the role Buchanan prefers for his country.

Source: The Economist, p. 31
, Oct 2, 1999

Push US foreign policy toward isolationism

Buchanan said his goal was to push US foreign policy toward isolationism. “We need a foreign policy that will get us out of all these foreign entanglements and quarrels that are poisoning our politics and assuring the US will be involved in wars in the
future that are none of our business,” he said. Buchanan holds such strongly isolationist views that he believes the US had no compelling interest in fighting in WWII, although it should have supported its allies.

Source: Boston Globe, p. A4
, Sep 20, 1999

Withdraw from UN; Kyoto Treaty; Rome Treaty

I will demand the US Senate reject Al Gore’s industry-butchering Kyoto Treaty. The Rome treaty creating a new UN war crimes tribunal will be ash-canned. We will withdraw from all UN and global agencies that do not serve American interests. A Buchanan
Administration will recapture America’s lost sovereignty.

End foreign aid; withdraw from most of IMF

The World Bank will be privatized. Not one dime of the International Monetary Fund will go to prop up corrupt foreign regimes or countries hostile to the United States. Fifty years of foreign aid, an ancient relic of the cold war, will be brought to an
end.

End New World Order; end foreign aid

I read that our government backed a World Bank loan of $265 million to Hanoi, which is still a communist regime. This means [US taxpayers are] guaranteeing loans to the regime that murdered [our sons who were sent] to Vietnam. That, my friends, is your
New World Order. I want to say to all the globalists and internationalists-when I raise my hand to take the oath of office, your New World Order comes crashing down.

It is time we begin looking out for our country and our people first for a change.
Look at foreign aid. Each year we send $12 billion abroad in foreign aid. $50 billion goes to Mexico. World Bank loans go to communist China. If we cannot balance our own budget, what are we doing sending American dollars abroad to balance the budgets of
foreign countries? We cut our budget for the elderly & veterans & farmers-then our government ships $12 billion abroad. When I get to the White House, foreign aid will come to an end and we will start looking out for the forgotten Americans right here.

Pat Buchanan on History & Philosophy

Patriotism is the soul of a nation

In Catholic doctrine, death occurs when the soul departs the body, after which the body begins to decompose. So it is with nations.

Patriotism is the soul of a nation. It is what keeps a nation alive. When patriotism dies, when a nation loses the love
and loyalty of its people, the nation dies and begins to decompose.

Patriotism is not nation-worship. It is not that spirit of nationalism that must denigrate or dominate other nations. It is a passionate attachment to one's own country--its land, its
people, its past, its heroes, literature, language, traditions, cultures, and customs.

For a nation to endure, its people must form a moral and social community and share higher values than economic interests. To be a nation, a people must BELIEVE they
are a nation. We Americans must see ourselves as of a unique and common nationality--in order to remain a nation.

For love of country--patriotism--is the soul of a country; and when the soul departs, the body dies.

Mexico has historic territorial grievances against US

Mexico has historic grievances against the US. These are taught to its children and felt deeply by millions of Mexicans who believe we robbed their country of half its land. The indoctrination has taken. When Mexicans were asked, "Do you agree or
disagree that the territory of the US Southwest belongs to Mexico?" 58% agreed. Only 28% disagreed that CA, TX, NM, and AZ rightfully belong to Mexico or the US.

This sense of grievances is embedded in the Mexican consciousness. And in America, there
is a reciprocal sense of guilt over what our fathers did, that has been bred into schoolchildren since the 1960s.

What we did to Mexico, Mexico is doing to us. People of Mexican ancestry living here by 2050, most of them in CA, TX, NM, and AZ, lands
Mexico regards as stolen. Paralyzed by guilt, we are inviting La Reconquista, the reconquest of the Southwest by Mexico, even as Ferdinand and Isabella effected La Reconquista in 1492 from the Moors who had invaded 800 years before.

By not maintaining population, Europe has begun to die

As late as 1960, European people, including Americans, Australians, and Canadians, numbered 750 million, 1/4 of the 3 billion people alive. Western nations were in the baby boom of the century. Shorn of their empires, the wounds of war healed,
they seemed alive with vitality. Indeed, neo-Malthusians were bewailing the population explosion, warning darkly that the earth's resources and land were running out. They were laughed at. By 2000, however, no one was laughing.

While world population had doubled to 6 billion in 40 years, the European people had stopped reproducing. Their populations had begun to stagnate and, in many countries, had already begun to fall.
Of Europe's 47 nations, only one, Muslim Albania, was, by 2000, maintaining a birthrate sufficient to keep it alive indefinitely. Europe had begun to die.

Europe is becoming more Islamic & Arabic, and paralyzed

Something vital has gone out of Europe.

The day of Europe is over. The coming mass migration from the Islamic world will so change the ethnic composition of the Old Country that Europeans will be too paralyzed by a threat of terrorism to intervene
in North Africa, the Middle East, or the Persian Gulf. Europeans already ignore US sanctions on Iran, Iraq, and Libya. As their populations become more Arabic and Islamic, paralysis will set in. We should know.
From the 1850s until WwWI, US policy toward the British Empire was held hostage by the Irish, whose votes were decisive in states like NY.

With populations declining and children vanishing,
Europe has no vital interest to justify tens of thousands of their young to war if they are not attacked. At present birthrates, Europe's population in 2100 will be less than 1/3 what it is today. Europe has voted for "la dolce vita."

Armenia: History shows national interest trumps atrocities

Q: In Buchanan’s book, he praised the way the British were mistreating the Armenians, in what he called the Armenian holocaust. If it’s America first, why did he prefer Britain to Armenia as far as people being mistreated goes?

A: I did not say that
was a good thing at all. What I said was that if you go back in all these massacres and genocides of peoples, you will find that despite the fact that statesmen say this is awful and it can’t happen again, it does every single time and there has never
been a real intervention to stop it.

The British issue was with the Bulgarian massacres by the Turks. Disraeli said we ought to stay with the Turks even though they did it, and Gladstone said we ought to throw the Turks out of Europe even though
they’re our allies. What I’m saying was this shows you when national interest come into collision, even with horrific human rights atrocities, every time virtually, national interest wins. I don’t say it’s morally right. I was writing history.

Source: National Public Radio interview, “Talk of the Nation”
, May 30, 2000

Hitler was no threat to US; sought mastery of Europe only

Following his victory [over France in 1940], Hitler made no overt move to threaten US vital interests. As of mid-1940, his actions argue that beneath the overlay of Nazi ideology, he was driven by a traditional German policy of “The Drive to the East.”
In this analysis, Hitler had not wanted war with the West. Hitler saw the world divided into four spheres: Great Britain holding its empire; Japan, dominant in East Asia; Germany, master of Europe; and America, mistress of the Western Hemisphere.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.268-9
, Oct 9, 1999

FDR forced Japan to attack US as back door to WWII

In early 1941, FDR froze all Japanese assets, cutting off trade, including oil. Without oil, the Japanese empire must wither & die.. The oil embargo was “economic war” against an oil-starved nation. FDR knew the consequences of an oil embargo & approved,
because he wanted Japan to attack. A war with Japan was the only way he could take us to war in Europe. FDR seemed anxious to get into the war, [but was] elected on a promise to stay out, [so] FDR needed to maneuver Japan into firing the first shot.

Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.285-7
, Oct 9, 1999

American leaders obsessed with Jewish influence

In a chapter of his book criticizing the power of numerous American ethnic groups over foreign policy, Buchanan writes, “After WWII, Jewish influence over foreign policy became almost an obsession with American leaders.” Buchanan responded to critics
that the observation was lifted from a complex criticism directed at numerous groups. “One paragraph discussing the power of the Israeli lobby is not only legitimate, it is necessary,” he declared.

Source: Francis X. Clines, New York Times, p. A20
, Sep 21, 1999

Hitler was no direct threat to the US after 1940

In his book, Buchanan says that Hitler offered “no physical threat to the US” as of late 1940, after his defeat in the Battle of Britain. Buchanan questions whether Hitler sought war with the West or was driven to it. “Hitler made no overt move to
threaten US vital interests” after his initial victories across Europe, Buchanan writes. Americans had no choice but to fight once Hitler declared war on the US, but Hitler was primarily interested in building an empire to the East, not westward toward t

Source: Francis X. Clines, New York Times, p. A20
, Sep 21, 1999

Give GOP credit for Reagan’s ending of the Cold War

Under the Reagan Doctrine, one by one, the communist dominos began to fall. First, Grenada was liberated. Then, the Red Army was run out of Afghanistan, by U.S. weapons. In Nicaragua, the Marxist regime was forced to hold free elections - by Ronald
Reagan’s contra army. Have they forgotten? It was under our party that the Berlin Wall came down, and Europe was reunited. It was under our party that the Soviet Empire collapsed, and the captive nations broke free. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.